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Farahi N, Lazar T, Wodak SJ, Tompa P, Pancsa R. Integration of Data from Liquid-Liquid Phase Separation Databases Highlights Concentration and Dosage Sensitivity of LLPS Drivers. Int J Mol Sci 2021; 22:ijms22063017. [PMID: 33809541 PMCID: PMC8002189 DOI: 10.3390/ijms22063017] [Citation(s) in RCA: 23] [Impact Index Per Article: 7.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/27/2021] [Revised: 03/12/2021] [Accepted: 03/13/2021] [Indexed: 12/13/2022] Open
Abstract
Liquid–liquid phase separation (LLPS) is a molecular process that leads to the formation of membraneless organelles, representing functionally specialized liquid-like cellular condensates formed by proteins and nucleic acids. Integrating the data on LLPS-associated proteins from dedicated databases revealed only modest agreement between them and yielded a high-confidence dataset of 89 human LLPS drivers. Analysis of the supporting evidence for our dataset uncovered a systematic and potentially concerning difference between protein concentrations used in a good fraction of the in vitro LLPS experiments, a key parameter that governs the phase behavior, and the proteomics-derived cellular abundance levels of the corresponding proteins. Closer scrutiny of the underlying experimental data enabled us to offer a sound rationale for this systematic difference, which draws on our current understanding of the cellular organization of the proteome and the LLPS process. In support of this rationale, we find that genes coding for our human LLPS drivers tend to be dosage-sensitive, suggesting that their cellular availability is tightly regulated to preserve their functional role in direct or indirect relation to condensate formation. Our analysis offers guideposts for increasing agreement between in vitro and in vivo studies, probing the roles of proteins in LLPS.
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Affiliation(s)
- Nazanin Farahi
- VIB-VUB Center for Structural Biology, Flemish Institute for Biotechnology, 1050 Brussels, Belgium; (N.F.); (T.L.); (S.J.W.)
- Structural Biology Brussels, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 1050 Brussels, Belgium
- Department of Biology, Technical University of Kaiserslautern, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany
| | - Tamas Lazar
- VIB-VUB Center for Structural Biology, Flemish Institute for Biotechnology, 1050 Brussels, Belgium; (N.F.); (T.L.); (S.J.W.)
- Structural Biology Brussels, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 1050 Brussels, Belgium
| | - Shoshana J. Wodak
- VIB-VUB Center for Structural Biology, Flemish Institute for Biotechnology, 1050 Brussels, Belgium; (N.F.); (T.L.); (S.J.W.)
- Structural Biology Brussels, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 1050 Brussels, Belgium
| | - Peter Tompa
- VIB-VUB Center for Structural Biology, Flemish Institute for Biotechnology, 1050 Brussels, Belgium; (N.F.); (T.L.); (S.J.W.)
- Structural Biology Brussels, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 1050 Brussels, Belgium
- Institute of Enzymology, Research Centre for Natural Sciences, 1117 Budapest, Hungary
- Correspondence: (P.T.); (R.P.)
| | - Rita Pancsa
- Institute of Enzymology, Research Centre for Natural Sciences, 1117 Budapest, Hungary
- Correspondence: (P.T.); (R.P.)
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Hou C, Xie H, Fu Y, Ma Y, Li T. MloDisDB: a manually curated database of the relations between membraneless organelles and diseases. Brief Bioinform 2020; 22:5943794. [PMID: 33126250 DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbaa271] [Citation(s) in RCA: 9] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/10/2020] [Revised: 09/15/2020] [Accepted: 09/19/2020] [Indexed: 01/03/2023] Open
Abstract
Cells are compartmentalized by numerous membrane-bounded organelles and membraneless organelles (MLOs) to ensure temporal and spatial regulation of various biological processes. A number of MLOs, such as nucleoli, nuclear speckles and stress granules, exist as liquid droplets within the cells and arise from the condensation of proteins and RNAs via liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS). By concentrating certain proteins and RNAs, MLOs accelerate biochemical reactions and protect cells during stress, and dysfunction of MLOs is associated with various pathological processes. With the development in this field, more and more relations between the MLOs and diseases have been described; however, these results have not been made available in a centralized resource. Herein, we build MloDisDB, a database which aims to gather the relations between MLOs and diseases from dispersed literature. In addition, the relations between LLPS and diseases were included as well. Currently, MloDisDB contains 771 curated entries from 607 publications; each entry in MloDisDB contains detailed information about the MLO, the disease and the functional factor in the relation. Furthermore, an efficient and user-friendly interface for users to search, browse and download all entries was provided. MloDisDB is the first comprehensive database of the relations between MLOs and diseases so far, and the database is freely accessible at http://mlodis.phasep.pro/.
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Affiliation(s)
- Chao Hou
- Department of Biomedical Informatics, Peking University Health Science Center
| | | | - Yang Fu
- Peking University Health Science Center
| | - Yao Ma
- Peking University Health Science Center
| | - Tingting Li
- Department of Biomedical Informatics, Peking University Health Science Center, Beijing, China
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Littmann M, Goldberg T, Seitz S, Bodén M, Rost B. Detailed prediction of protein sub-nuclear localization. BMC Bioinformatics 2019; 20:205. [PMID: 31014229 PMCID: PMC6480651 DOI: 10.1186/s12859-019-2790-9] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.4] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/27/2018] [Accepted: 04/02/2019] [Indexed: 12/21/2022] Open
Abstract
Background Sub-nuclear structures or locations are associated with various nuclear processes. Proteins localized in these substructures are important to understand the interior nuclear mechanisms. Despite advances in high-throughput methods, experimental protein annotations remain limited. Predictions of cellular compartments have become very accurate, largely at the expense of leaving out substructures inside the nucleus making a fine-grained analysis impossible. Results Here, we present a new method (LocNuclei) that predicts nuclear substructures from sequence alone. LocNuclei used a string-based Profile Kernel with Support Vector Machines (SVMs). It distinguishes sub-nuclear localization in 13 distinct substructures and distinguishes between nuclear proteins confined to the nucleus and those that are also native to other compartments (traveler proteins). High performance was achieved by implicitly leveraging a large biological knowledge-base in creating predictions by homology-based inference through BLAST. Using this approach, the performance reached AUC = 0.70–0.74 and Q13 = 59–65%. Travelling proteins (nucleus and other) were identified at Q2 = 70–74%. A Gene Ontology (GO) analysis of the enrichment of biological processes revealed that the predicted sub-nuclear compartments matched the expected functionality. Analysis of protein-protein interactions (PPI) show that formation of compartments and functionality of proteins in these compartments highly rely on interactions between proteins. This suggested that the LocNuclei predictions carry important information about function. The source code and data sets are available through GitHub: https://github.com/Rostlab/LocNuclei. Conclusions LocNuclei predicts subnuclear compartments and traveler proteins accurately. These predictions carry important information about functionality and PPIs. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s12859-019-2790-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
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Affiliation(s)
- Maria Littmann
- Department of Informatics, Bioinformatics & Computational Biology - i12, TUM (Technical University of Munich), Boltzmannstr. 3, 85748, Garching/Munich, Germany.
| | - Tatyana Goldberg
- Department of Informatics, Bioinformatics & Computational Biology - i12, TUM (Technical University of Munich), Boltzmannstr. 3, 85748, Garching/Munich, Germany
| | - Sebastian Seitz
- Department of Informatics, Bioinformatics & Computational Biology - i12, TUM (Technical University of Munich), Boltzmannstr. 3, 85748, Garching/Munich, Germany
| | - Mikael Bodén
- School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences, UQ (University of Queensland), Cooper Rd, Brisbane City, QLD, 4072, Australia
| | - Burkhard Rost
- Department of Informatics, Bioinformatics & Computational Biology - i12, TUM (Technical University of Munich), Boltzmannstr. 3, 85748, Garching/Munich, Germany.,Institute for Advanced Study (TUM-IAS), Lichtenbergstr 2a, 85748, Garching/Munich, Germany.,TUM School of Life Sciences Weihenstephan (WZW), Alte Akademie 8, Freising, Germany.,Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics & New York Consortium on Membrane Protein Structure (NYCOMPS), Columbia University, 701 West, 168th Street, New York, NY, 10032, USA
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Na I, Meng F, Kurgan L, Uversky VN. Autophagy-related intrinsically disordered proteins in intra-nuclear compartments. MOLECULAR BIOSYSTEMS 2017; 12:2798-817. [PMID: 27377881 DOI: 10.1039/c6mb00069j] [Citation(s) in RCA: 25] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.6] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 01/19/2023]
Abstract
Recent analyses indicated that autophagy can be regulated via some nuclear transcriptional networks and many important players in the autophagy and other forms of programmed cell death are known to be intrinsically disordered. To this end, we analyzed similarities and differences in the intrinsic disorder distribution of nuclear and non-nuclear proteins related to autophagy. We also looked at the peculiarities of the distribution of the intrinsically disordered autophagy-related proteins in various intra-nuclear organelles, such as the nucleolus, chromatin, Cajal bodies, nuclear speckles, promyelocytic leukemia (PML) nuclear bodies, nuclear lamina, nuclear pores, and perinucleolar compartment. This analysis revealed that the autophagy-related proteins constitute about 2.5% of the non-nuclear proteins and 3.3% of the nuclear proteins, which corresponds to a substantial enrichment by about 32% in the nucleus. Curiously, although, in general, the autophagy-related proteins share similar characteristics of disorder with a generic set of all non-nuclear proteins, chromatin and nuclear speckles are enriched in the intrinsically disordered autophagy proteins (29 and 37% of these proteins are disordered, respectively) and have high disorder content at 0.24 and 0.27, respectively. Therefore, our data suggest that some of the nuclear disordered proteins may play important roles in autophagy.
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Affiliation(s)
- Insung Na
- Department of Molecular Medicine, Morsani College of Medicine, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33612, USA.
| | - Fanchi Meng
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2V4, Canada
| | - Lukasz Kurgan
- Department of Computer Science, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA 23219, USA.
| | - Vladimir N Uversky
- Department of Molecular Medicine, Morsani College of Medicine, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33612, USA. and USF Health Byrd Alzheimer's Research Institute, Morsani College of Medicine, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33612, USA and Biology Department, Faculty of Science, King Abdulaziz University, P.O. Box 80203, Jeddah 21589, Saudi Arabia and Laboratory of Structural Dynamics, Stability and Folding of Proteins, Institute of Cytology, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg 194064, Russia
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Meng F, Na I, Kurgan L, Uversky VN. Compartmentalization and Functionality of Nuclear Disorder: Intrinsic Disorder and Protein-Protein Interactions in Intra-Nuclear Compartments. Int J Mol Sci 2015; 17:ijms17010024. [PMID: 26712748 PMCID: PMC4730271 DOI: 10.3390/ijms17010024] [Citation(s) in RCA: 82] [Impact Index Per Article: 9.1] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/11/2015] [Revised: 11/23/2015] [Accepted: 12/18/2015] [Indexed: 01/12/2023] Open
Abstract
The cell nucleus contains a number of membrane-less organelles or intra-nuclear compartments. These compartments are dynamic structures representing liquid-droplet phases which are only slightly denser than the bulk intra-nuclear fluid. They possess different functions, have diverse morphologies, and are typically composed of RNA (or, in some cases, DNA) and proteins. We analyzed 3005 mouse proteins localized in specific intra-nuclear organelles, such as nucleolus, chromatin, Cajal bodies, nuclear speckles, promyelocytic leukemia (PML) nuclear bodies, nuclear lamina, nuclear pores, and perinuclear compartment and compared them with ~29,863 non-nuclear proteins from mouse proteome. Our analysis revealed that intrinsic disorder is enriched in the majority of intra-nuclear compartments, except for the nuclear pore and lamina. These compartments are depleted in proteins that lack disordered domains and enriched in proteins that have multiple disordered domains. Moonlighting proteins found in multiple intra-nuclear compartments are more likely to have multiple disordered domains. Protein-protein interaction networks in the intra-nuclear compartments are denser and include more hubs compared to the non-nuclear proteins. Hubs in the intra-nuclear compartments (except for the nuclear pore) are enriched in disorder compared with non-nuclear hubs and non-nuclear proteins. Therefore, our work provides support to the idea of the functional importance of intrinsic disorder in the cell nucleus and shows that many proteins associated with sub-nuclear organelles in nuclei of mouse cells are enriched in disorder. This high level of disorder in the mouse nuclear proteins defines their ability to serve as very promiscuous binders, possessing both large quantities of potential disorder-based interaction sites and the ability of a single such site to be involved in a large number of interactions.
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Affiliation(s)
- Fanchi Meng
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G 2V4, Canada.
| | - Insung Na
- Department of Molecular Medicine, Morsani College of Medicine, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33612, USA.
| | - Lukasz Kurgan
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G 2V4, Canada.
- Department of Computer Science, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA 23219, USA.
| | - Vladimir N Uversky
- Department of Molecular Medicine, Morsani College of Medicine, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33612, USA.
- University of South Florida Health Byrd Alzheimer's Research Institute, Morsani College of Medicine, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33612, USA.
- Institute for Biological Instrumentation, Russian Academy of Sciences, Pushchino, Moscow Region 142292, Russian.
- Biology Department, Faculty of Science, King Abdulaziz University, P.O. Box 80203, Jeddah 21589, Saudi Arabia.
- Laboratory of Structural Dynamics, Stability and Folding of Proteins, Institute of Cytology, Russian Academy of Sciences, Saint Petersburg 194064, Russian.
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